


Lifelines

by darkbluebox



Series: AFTG Angst Fest 2020 [2]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Immortality, Kidnapping, M/M, Major Character Injury, Neil can't die, Prompt: you can't die, Supernatural Elements, Temporary Character Death, Torture, aftg angst fest, puts neil in a blender and insists he's fine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-04
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:42:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27389668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkbluebox/pseuds/darkbluebox
Summary: “You’re awfully nervous for a man with nothing to fear.” Andrew has Neil in one hand, his cigarette in the other. One moment of inattention and either could be sent tumbling over the roof’s edge. Neil’s heart hammers so frantically that he’s sure Andrew must feel it through the hand bunched in his shirt, stuttering nervously like the beating wings of a sparrow. The frailty is an illusion; Neil has yet to meet anything that will stop it powering on, dragging him through the worst the world has to offer him.“You and I know there’s far more to fear in this world than death.”Andrew makes a noise several shades too derisive to count as laughter. “And what do you fear?”Neil thinks of a dark, musty room, and the steady drip of blood on tiles. “Eternity.”
Relationships: Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard
Series: AFTG Angst Fest 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1980787
Comments: 24
Kudos: 234
Collections: AFTG ANGST FEST





	Lifelines

**Author's Note:**

> This ended up way longer than expected which is why I missed the posting date by a looooong shot... Better late than never! 
> 
> For AFTG Angst Fest day 23: You can't die

His father starts, as promised, with his legs. He slices the tendons with thick, blunt blades that catch in the shredded flesh, eliciting noises that would be stomach-turning if they could be heard over the screaming. There isn’t much left by the time Nathan is finished, lumps of quivering flesh that may have once resembled a human but no more.

By all rights, he should be dead.

But he isn’t. He waits for death to release him from the sweat and blood and agony, but past all reason, all possibility, his heart keeps forcing blood through his veins only for it to spill out onto the cold tiles of his father’s basement.

Eventually, the voices grow distant, and the room grows dark. They didn’t bother locking the door, never imagined that what remained of him could still be capable of movement. On shaky, new limbs that heal with a speed that Neil never thought possible, he drags what is left of himself into the dark.

Three months later, they catch him again at a rest-stop near Chicago. He doesn’t know if they understand what has happened to him any better than he does; he doesn’t stick around to ask. In the backseat of a car wheeling its way back to Baltimore, he cuts and cuts and cuts until the meaty stump of his hand slips through the handcuff without catching.

The cops find a steaming wreck of a car at the roadside, and Malcom’s body cooling in the driver’s seat. The source of the pool of blood in the back, however, remains a mystery to them. The flesh of his regrown hand stings as the night wind catches it, and he picks up a new name and a new look and loses himself once more.

A month later, he is shot.

Days after that, stabbed.

Weeks later, he spits up blood as the gash drawn across his throat seals itself over, fading to a vivid, white line against dark skin. The store clerk stares at it as he swaps his blood-stained tee for a high-collar polo shirt. Later, while examining the scar in a dingy motel bathroom, he wonders in a detached kind of way whether he’ll ever grow numb to the pain, nerves torn through by endless wear and tear. He touches an exploratory finger to the scar, and yanks it back as the ghost of a blade tears through his throat once more. No. He never had that kind of luck.

“He’s been waiting a long time for you,” Lola hisses. Her threats spiral like smoke in the icy mountain air. The wind whips her hair around her face as she backs him up against the cliff edge. “We kept your room _just_ the way you left it. Ready and waiting for your family reunion. We’re going to kill you again, and again, and again, and again, and…” She punctuates her every word with another step forward, and he steps back in turn. As his heels hit the edge, her smile turns sharkish.

Between the cliff and Lola, the decision is easy. He lets himself fall.

He doesn’t hear Lola’s outraged shriek, doesn’t remember landing, doesn’t linger long in the snowdrift before hauling himself back towards civilisation. He doesn’t think about the creak and shift of his ribcage realigning, but he does worry about the deep tracks he leaves in the snow behind him.

He takes a new name, and heads to Arizona.

“You can’t die.” Andrew’s tone is flat, yet still somehow still laced with disdain.

“I said you wouldn’t believe me.” Neil glances over to Wymack, who is watching with his arms crossed, understanding nothing of the German passing between them.

“I never said I didn’t believe you. It would be a stupid lie to tell, even by your standards.”

“So you _do_ believe me.”

“I never said that, either.”

“There’s one way to know for sure.”

Andrew smiles ghoulishly. “I promised coach I wouldn’t spill blood on his carpet.”

“If you can’t figure out how to kill me without spilling any blood then you’re not as good as I thought you were.”

Andrew’s eyes flick over Neil, as though mapping out points of vulnerability, or perhaps looking for something else he missed. “We’ll see.”

Neil waits for Andrew to test his truth, but the night never comes.

 _A toy that never breaks_ , Riko calls him, when he uncovers Neil’s secret. His delight drips from his lips like saliva. Buried in the nest, he takes his knives to Neil again, and again, and again, and-

Neil doesn’t die.

With the marks of Christmas still fresh on their skin, Andrew takes him to the roof, eyes roaming critically over Neil’s recoloured hair and naked eyes. He drags Neil over to the edge by his collar, and Neil wonders if Andrew has finally decided to kill him. It’s a long drop to the concrete below, and the horrified churn of Neil’s stomach isn’t lessened by the knowledge that his body will knit his broken bones back together afterwards.

“You’re awfully nervous for a man with nothing to fear.” Andrew has Neil in one hand, his cigarette in the other. One moment of inattention and either could be sent tumbling over the roof’s edge. Neil’s heart hammers so frantically that he’s sure Andrew must feel it through the hand bunched in his shirt, stuttering nervously like the beating wings of a sparrow. The frailty is an illusion; Neil has yet to meet anything that will stop it powering on, dragging him through the worst the world has to offer him.

“You and I know there’s far more to fear in this world than death.”

Andrew makes a noise several shades too derisive to count as laughter. “And what do you fear?”

Neil thinks of a dark, musty room, and the steady drip of blood on tiles. “Eternity.”

Andrew’s hand releases Neil’s shirt to lie flat against his chest, and for a moment Neil is sure that Andrew is finally going to push him over. He studies Neil with eyes that burn amber against the brisk winter sky, and the moment stretches into forever between them. Not the kind of forever that Neil fears – an eternity spent in the dark being broken and broken and broken is the kind that haunts him at night, but this electrifying moment of uncertainty, he could… tolerate.

Andrew’s hand is warm enough that Neil misses the heat when he withdraws it. Neil tilts forward, although whether he’s following Andrew or escaping the drop behind him he can’t say. Andrew doesn’t acknowledge the impulse as he flicks his cigarette butt off the roof, but his eyes don’t leave Neil’s face.

“Just because you can’t die,” Andrew says, words clipped with a tension Neil can’t decipher, “doesn’t mean you have nothing to lose.”

“I know.” It’s a new truth that burns like acid in his chest, painful as it is terrifying. “I went to the nest because I have something I _can’t_ lose.”

Andrew’s fingers twitch. Maybe he regrets throwing his cigarette off the roof. Maybe he regrets not throwing Neil off after it. “Get out of my sight.”

Neil leaves, heart still beating a frantic pace as though he left it up on the roof edge with Andrew.

He used to believe that it wasn’t the world that was cruel, but the people in it. But people – as far as Neil knows – are not responsible for the power that drags him back to life over and over. For a man who spent the best part of his life on the run, immortality should be a blessing; an immunity to the sticky end that was guaranteed to come to him at his father’s hand. Instead, Neil’s fears have multiplied a hundredfold. At least before, he had been guaranteed some kind of release, no matter how slow and painful the means. Now he fears a lifetime spent in a dark basement, a body pulling itself back together only to be torn apart once more, like Prometheus chained to his rock, rip, repair, repeat.

He wonders what his mother, who he can only picture clawing towards him across the blood-stained tiles of his father’s basement, would have thought of it all. A woman who sacrificed a true life in favour of survival, who put herself through the unimaginable just to keep Neil alive, would perhaps have appreciated Neil’s curse more than he ever could. Maybe it was her sheer determination that landed Neil in this mess, bending the laws of reality itself from beyond the grave just to keep her son’s heart beating. For a moment, Neil is so overcome with hatred that he can barely breathe for it. It’s only now, with his Foxes, that he understands the difference between surviving and living, and if he had any real choice in the matter he would take the latter without hesitation.

Surviving is scraping himself off a grey tile floor and losing himself along stretches of highway that tangle into forever. Living is the weight of Andrew’s body pinning him to the floor as he takes Neil apart again and again and again and-

Andrew says, “stay,” and Neil pictures another kind of forever.

_Three. Two. One. Zero._

There was nothing of Neil that needed protecting, that could be protected in any way that wasn’t covered by his curse, and yet Andrew had insisted all the same. _Give your back to me._

With Nathan’s men watching the door and Lola’s voice still hissing in his mind, Neil looks at his Foxes and makes the only choice he can. He gives them his forever.

_Thank you. You were amazing._

The gun digs into his spine as the team heads out, the threat dragging Neil’s attention away from the riot roaring to life around them. Still, the bullet comes as a surprise.

Of course, the only way to guarantee there isn’t a search is to make sure nobody thinks there’s anything to search for.

The sound registers before the pain does, earth-shatteringly loud even in the chaos of the riot. Neil’s ears scream with the aftershock, but the twist of the bullet inside him tears his attention elsewhere.

Muscles rip and bones shatter and organs burst as the bullet grinds through Neil’s body, and oh, he _liked_ this jacket. Red bleeds through the orange of Neil’s windbreaker, and if he had to guess he would say that the bullet had gone right through the _o_ in _Josten_.

The crowd screams and ripples around him, a blur of faces that could be Foxes or could be strangers for all Neil’s flickering vision can tell, and men dressed like paramedics seize him by the arms and drag him to a waiting van.

In his last, fleeting moments of consciousness he looks for Andrew.

Then the doors shut, and everything goes black.

He comes around with a bullet rattling around in his ribcage. Coughing the bullet up isn’t as unpleasant as it was being shot by it, but still it scratches Neil’s insides like sandpaper. Between retches he runs through curses in every language he can think of.

Finally, he forces the slug back up his throat and spits, watching as it clatters across the grey tiles.

Grey tiles.

Gr-

The realisation feels like falling off a cliff, dizzying, disorientating, and with the certainty of a rough landing awaiting him at the bottom.

“Rise and shine, kiddo.” He would recognise Lola’s voice anywhere. It seeps into his ears like blood, blocking everything else out.

“My teammates-” Neil stutters.

“Saw you die. Don’t worry, they won’t be looking for you. Well, only in the morgues. They won’t find your body, of course, but maybe we could snip a few pieces of you off for them to stumble upon. I’m feeling generous.” She trails a painted fingernail down Neil’s torso as though following an invisible dotted line. “Your immortality frustrated us at first, you know. But now we’ve all had time to reflect on it, and you know what we’ve seen?” She leans in close, and Neil tries not to breathe in as her perfume drowns him. “ _Potential.”_

Neil yanks at his arms, desperate to put anything between himself and Lola, but the rattle of handcuffs at his back is predictable as it is devastating. The cuffs around his ankles are an unexpected addition to the ensemble. He tries for a kick, but she surges forward, pinning his legs easily with the weight of her body.

His time in the nest – what he can remember of it – was a nightmare of knives and exy and Riko’s smile. But Riko was, when it came down to it, an amateur. He knew how to hurt, but he didn’t know how to _destroy_ , didn’t know the ins and outs of a body like his father’s people did, didn’t know where to draw the line that would keep a victim hovering between awake and unconscious, to keep them suffering that little bit longer. Riko was a bully, but he wasn’t a professional.

Neil survived by clinging to a few things – his foxes, exy, his promises to Andrew – but also to the knowledge that he had survived worse. Riko was a nightmare, it was true, but he was no butcher.

They leave him there to stew in the dark. With a lifetime to wait and their tracks well and truly covered, they have no need to hurry. The air that feeds into the basement through an array of soundproofed ducts is stale and faintly ashy. Without windows, he has no way of gaging the passage of time. The room isn’t just dark, it’s a _void_ , and as time melts Neil’s eyes start picking out patterns from thin air, shapes and shadows that slide around him. He thinks of the bitter January nights spent on the tower roof with Andrew, the glistening stars above and the glow of Palmetto below. He had lived each of those moments with the knowledge of how brutally it would all be ripped away from him, had known to savour the hum of the city and the sparkling sky and Andrew’s lips on his, but all the same he longs for it all just once more. The longing is such a persistent, unhealing pain in his chest that he wonders if it might be what finally kills him.

No such luck.

When the lights flick back on at last, it has been so long that the fluorescent bulbs all but blind him. Neil wants to be on guard against what’s coming, but reflexes force his head into the crook of his shoulder until his eyes can adjust. When he finally forces them open, he wishes he hadn’t, nausea rolling over him as his father’s distinctive outline comes into focus.

He speaks, probably, but nothing penetrates Neil’s terror. He’s five years younger, watching Lola drag his mother’s body away in pieces, promising she’ll be back for him next. Trying to connect the bloodstained hands of his mother’s corpse to the ones that first showed him how to tie his shoelaces, that sewed up his wounds with dental floss and whisky, that massaged hair die into his scalp and broke three of his ribs for kissing a girl…

He was too busy watching the patterns his mother’s blood made on the floor to notice the scars on his face and arms slowly seal themselves over. He did notice his father’s approach, freshly-polished axe glinting at his side.

Past and present blur into one. The first time, his father was restrained, savouring every drop of Neil’s blood as it dribbled onto the tiles. Then came the confusion as wounds sealed themselves over, then anger, cutting and cutting and cutting until Neil couldn’t even remember his own name. Both of them staring as his body knitted itself back together.

The sentence “passed out from the pain” was one that had always irritated Neil. People don’t pass out from pain. They pass out from blood loss, or lack of oxygen, or because of whatever is _causing_ them the pain. There is, however, no simple pain threshold after which the human mind will shut itself off regardless. Pain is not a trip switch. It might shut down the mind, but the body powers on. His body _always_ powers on, and trained hands could hold him on the knife-edge between conscious and not for a long, long time without sacrificing an inch of his pain.

This time, the butcher has no need to hold back. The axe swings, and Nathaniel screams.

He screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams until he can’t scream anymore.

And still he powers on.

Time passes. The lights flicker on. The lights flicker off. Light is terror, because it comes with pain, but not knowing what might creep in the shadows is its own kind of nightmare. Sometimes it’s his mother, clawing through a pool of her blood. Sometimes it’s Riko, racquet in hand, the Raven’s victory march roaring at his back as though a stadium is cheering him on. Sometimes it’s Andrew, blood running down his face, laughing faintly as drugs twist his mind into knots.

Lola likes to visit him in the dark, or he thinks she does. Maybe it’s just his own broken mind turning on him. Her disembodied voice puts words to the desperation clawing at the base of his skull. _Forever, forever, forever._

Nathaniel forgets the stars. It’s easier than longing for them.

One day, the lights click on, their low buzz enough by now to rouse Nathaniel immediately from sleep. But it is not his father, nor any of his men, who enter.

Nathaniel stares vacantly at the police uniform.

The cop leans against the wall with one hand, makes a faint choking sound. “We got a body down here.”

 _Do we?_ Nathaniel wonders.

There are more footsteps, more noises, the door opening and shutting. Neil doesn’t do anything until a hand touches his shoulder, and he jerks back into himself with a shout. Several people scream as Nathaniel wrenches himself away from the touch. The handcuffs bite into the torn flesh of his wrists and for a few minutes everything is a rush of movement and panic.

Eventually, a woman approaches with a pair of plyers in hand. Nathaniel’s vocal cords haven’t healed enough to scream, but the noise he makes seems to get his point across. Gently, without touching him, she twists the chain of the cuffs around his ankles until it snaps, and waits for him to still before repeating the action on his wrists. His arms tumble numbly forward, and Nathaniel slumps for the first time in… he doesn’t know.

“Nathan,” he says, voice like sand in his throat.

The officer glances to her colleague. “Dead.”

It takes Nathaniel a moment to recognise the sound that escapes him as laughter.

He wants to tell them that he can walk, but his throat has done all it can for him, and he doubts they’d believe him anyway. A stretcher comes, and when he catches a glimpse of himself in the upstairs mirror, he starts laughing all over again.

Then they pass through the oak double doors and down the drive towards the waiting ambulance, but the rest of the world fades to a faint mess of colours as Nathaniel stares, stares, stares at the burning blue sky, so bright that he thinks his eyes are going to melt, but he won’t look away.

He breathes.

When he next comes around, the world is soft and blurry, like he’s wearing glasses that don’t belong to him.

“Were you disqualified?” Nathaniel croaks.

There’s a huff of air from beside him. “Jesus, kid.”

His throat hurts too much to repeat the question, so Nathaniel looks pleadingly in what he guesses is Wymack’s direction until he gets his answer.

“We’re playing the Ravens on Saturday,” Wymack answers at last. “Neil-”*

He’s already asleep again, a smile pulling at his lips so painfully that he thinks he might have torn something in the effort.

The hospital doesn’t want to let him go, and neither does the FBI, but in the end neither can find a good enough reason to hold him. They took Nathan in a bust which turned violent, leaving his most of his men dead. The promise of a reunion with the Foxes on the horizon, Nathaniel fidgets with his hair in the bathroom mirror as though taming it to his liking will distract from the rest of him. He can heal himself of anything, but the scars always remained, and there are so many that Nathaniel barely recognises his own reflection. While he’s worried about the foxes’ reactions, more than anything, he’s grateful. There isn’t a hint of his father left in his appearance.

And, at last, he is returned to his Foxes.

The deathly quiet of the room is broken by a whispered, “Neil?”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he says by way of answer.

“It _is_ him,” Nicky confirms, a little hysterically. Matt makes a pained noise and reaches for Nathaniel’s face, and he can’t help but flinch away from the contact. Matt drops his hand, expression crumbling.

“No,” says Allison sharply. Renee tries to place a hand on her arm, but she throws it off. “No. I’m calling bullshit. We saw you get shot. We saw you _die_.”

“Where’s Andrew?” He knows the goalkeeper has to be okay, the Foxes could never have made it to the finals without him, but still he needs to _see_. Allison makes a frustrated noise, so he looks to Renee instead.

“The police just wanted to go over a few more things with him.”

“Like how he beat them at their own job,” Aaron adds flatly. “And how he knew that their dead man wasn’t dead after all.”

Nathaniel ignored the accusation in his tone. “He went to the _police?_ ”

“He dragged Kevin in by the neck and told him to say whatever it took to set them after the butcher.”

Nathaniel’s eyes snap to Kevin. “What did you-?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Kevin replies with a kind of certainty Nathaniel has never heard from him before. “It worked.” His eyes linger on Nathaniel’s cheekbone, tracing out what remains of his tattoo. “It worked,” he repeats quietly, as though still convincing himself of the fact.

Nathaniel considers dropping into French to scold Kevin for putting himself in the line of fire, but there’s nothing he can say that Kevin doesn’t already know. After all, Nathaniel knows better than anyone how faint the world’s dangers seem with Andrew at one’s back.

He turns to Wymack. “Take me to him.”

“Neil, you need to rest,” says Abby. “You need your injuries checked, you need-”

“I need Andrew.” Nathaniel runs a hand over his face, feeling the new ridges and bumps drag against his fingertips. “Look at me. _Really_ look. These aren’t injuries, they’re scars.”

“Old scars,” says Dan faintly. “But it doesn’t make _sense_ , Neil-”

“You deserve answers. All of you do. But first, I need to see Andrew.”

Reluctantly, the Foxes agree. They seem unwilling to let Nathaniel out of their sight, however momentarily. He ducks back from their open arms, his heart tipping around in his chest like a boat in a stormy sea, overwhelmed by their affection but unable to reciprocate. Every time hands twitch in his direction, his vision blackens and his body tenses, preparing for a new wave of pain. His injuries may have healed themselves, but each brush of contact revives the sensations that scratch through his skin like phantom fingernails.

Wymack drops Nathaniel at his apartment before heading off to collect Andrew, silencing Nathaniel’s protests with a heavy look. He may have a point – the last place Nathaniel wants to do this is a crowded police precinct.

Nathaniel’s legs buckle as soon as Wymack shuts the door behind him, but luckily his couch is there to catch him.

He is woken by the door tearing open.

Andrew is kneeling before him in an instant, but somehow he knows – _knows_ – not to touch. Arms held stiffly at his sides, he looks his fill, cataloguing every new cut and bruise with his all-consuming gaze. It melts something stiff and painful in Nathaniel’s soul, and he lets himself soften under Andrew’s gaze, spine curving as he melts back into the couch.

For the first time in days, weeks, months, forever – he feels safe.

Andrew whispers his name, and it is his once more.

Physical contact is slow to return to Neil, coming in fits and starts as he gives himself back to the steady care of Andrew’s hands. The dark of night is terrifying, but the court’s glaring artificial lights are worse, and it takes a long time for him to feel comfortable under anything but the gentle amber of sunset.

He learns to love the weight of Andrew’s hands pinning his scarred wrists to the pillow, loves the drag of Andrew’s callouses against the ridges of his healing skin.

The Foxes, to Neil’s eternal surprise and gratitude, accept his truth for what it is. He can tell from the sad glances most of them flit between him and Andrew that they have worries that they aren’t intrusive enough to voice, worries about their future. Neil doesn’t know if he can ever die, doesn’t even know if he can age. He may have an eternity, but Andrew doesn’t, and the prospect of a forever without him is a new kind of horror that jerks him awake in the night as frequently as any of his most violent nightmares.

Instead of acknowledging the time-bomb between them, Neil presses his lips to the pale freckle hidden behind Andrew’s ear and whispers, “ _stay.”_

He’s back on court in time for them to face the Ravens, and under the glow of stadium lights he feels all but on fire. The final timer screams, and Neil falls to his knees, the world hazing over as the adrenaline of their victory pounds through him.

He can only watch with a detached kind of fascination as Riko’s racquet whistles down in the direction of his head. He doesn’t bother to brace himself for pain, doesn’t bother closing his eyes, knows that nothing he can say or do will make the pain any less consuming. He feels only a flash of regret that his family will have to witness something so undoubtedly unpleasant.

There’s a sick _thud_ as racquet connects with body, but the pain never comes. Neil blinks, and his world falls out from under him as he sees who was on the receiving end of the strike.

The racquet hits the floor a moment before Andrew does. Both are dripping with blood.

The world blurs into a rush of blood and noise, but this time it isn’t Neil’s blood, but he can feel the impact regardless, screaming through him like a bullet but _worse_ , and there are hands and faces and they want to separate them, no, no, never again, and Neil hooks a finger into Andrew’s collar and holds it like a lifeline even if he isn’t sure who it’s keeping alive, and then there’s the rumble of an ambulance and the fragile blip of machinery-

And then quiet.

Alone in a hospital room, Neil finds the tangle of _something_ deep in his chest and unravels it, unspooling the source of his impossible power like gossamer thread, so thin and fragile between his fingers for all it has endured, and although he had never wanted it he had never had anywhere else to keep it but within himself, but not anymore, and he weaves and weaves and weaves and finally, finally, finally Andrew opens his eyes.

He touches his hand to where the pain should be, before turning heavy eyes on Neil. “What did you do?”

“Why?” Neil says, because it’s the only syllable he has been able to string together since Riko’s racquet hit its mark. “You knew I could have taken it. You knew he couldn’t hurt me.”

“You can’t die. You can still be hurt.”

“Who cares?”

Andrew’s eyes darken with such fury that the rabbit part of Neil’s mind twitches instinctively. A moment later Andrew’s usual blank expression seals itself back over, and the anger is swallowed.

“I made you a promise,” he says at last.

Half-listening, Neil slips one of the knives from Andrew’s armbands and slides the blade across his palm. They watch as blood wells up along the thin slit and pools in Neil’s callouses. The wound stays.

“That’s new,” Neil says faintly. Andrew retrieves his blade and draws it across his own palm.

Neil doesn’t realise how tightly he’s gripping the sheets of Andrew’s bed until Andrew nudges his hand. “You’re getting blood everywhere.”

“So are you.”

Andrew turns his hand over, and slowly they trace each other’s wounds, fresh and painful and wonderfully _mortal_. Neil can’t feel a hint of the energy that kept him alive for so long, but when his blood mixes with Andrew’s there’s something new, an intricate tangle of _something_ holding them together.

It’s beautiful and terrible, bone-achingly addictive, and when Andrew cups Neil’s head and pulls him in it’s all he can taste, strong and fragile all at once, sweet and tingling against his lips.

They tie themselves together, and they never let go.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please remember to drop a comment <3
> 
> Come say hi [on tumblr](https://darkblueboxs.tumblr.com) and [twitter.](https://twitter.com/darkblueboxs)
> 
> *for the sake of convenience, I decided the Exy rules n regs committee was just hella chill about the whole "vanishing dead team member" thing


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